The new Hillary Clinton

Hillary Clinton has logged about a million diplomatic miles in the past four years, but her political odometer has been reset to factory zero as she exits the State Department Friday with the highest approval rating of any potential 2016 contender.

Even as Clinton concluded her victory lap on her way out of office this week, there were signs that the 65-year-old former first lady is still afflicted by the same problem that hampered her during the up-and-down 2008 campaign: an inability to clearly define her leadership or governing philosophy.

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An instinctive team player who spent two decades working at Bill Clinton’s side, Clinton has often struggled to tell her own tale with the self-promotional élan of her husband, often placing an emphasis of rationality over rationale, competence over a concise point-by-point presentation of her own accomplishments.

The best-known woman in the world has an ironic habit of getting lost in a crowd.

“She was a great delegator, she brought in formidable people — Richard Holbrooke, George Mitchell, Dennis Ross — and gave them meaningful responsibility that wasn’t about precluding her from getting involved but acknowledged the fact that there was a lot going on,” says P.J. Crowley, Clinton’s first spokesman at State.

Still, the team approach has worked brilliantly for Clinton since 2008. Few modern American politicians have enjoyed quite as dramatic a political rebirth as Clinton has experienced in her four years at the State Department, which has all but erased the taint of a humbling primary loss to Barack Obama, despite a tenure at State more workmanlike than transcendent.

The only recent political second act comparable was pulled off by Richard Nixon — the man Clinton tried to drive from office as a young staffer on the House Watergate committee in the early 1970s — who rebranded himself with the “New Nixon” label after a crushing California gubernatorial loss in 1962.

Clinton never fell as far, and may never rise as high as Nixon, but the past week’s farewell tour seems to augur the arrival of The New Hillary.

“Hillary Clinton has proven all her critics wrong,” says former Clinton adviser Neera Tanden, now president of the progressive Center for American Progress.

“She is respected by almost the entire public and has been a tremendous asset to the Obama administration; both a complete team player in the Cabinet and an international leader that has forged change in Burma, and managed crises from the Middle East to hot spots around the world,” added Tanden.

“I think Hillary will go down as one of the finest secretary of states we’ve had,” Obama said on Sunday.

Four years ago, Clinton was scoffing at any suggestion she’d ever run for the presidency again, not after an 18-month marathon that left her in debt and saddled with a reputation as a tough political competitor done in by her own managerial missteps and a misreading of a younger electorate turning away from her husband’s brand of 1990s centrism.